The lecture provides an overview addressing contemporary theories of space, which are debated in the field of urban studies and sociology of space first and foremost against the background of current discussions in the social sciences and humanities through the lense of everyday life.
More precisely, social, cultural and politcal theorizations of space will be related to contemporary praxis of urban develpment, to planning approaches in different cities world wide and to planning theories. These will be addressed by taking different conceptions of the city as a starting point
Lecture Unit 0 Kick-Off
Lecture Unit 1 Space, Place + Planning Theory - An Introduction
This lecture unit explains how theorizing space has always been central to poststructuralist perspectives that have identified planning as governmentality and which have traced basic shifts in planning theories and how they have addressed space in different eras and areas.
Lecture Unit 2 Urban Public Life + The Public City
This lecture unit explains how theorizing space as relational public space has been formative for those accounts in the social sciences and humanities interested in the study of everyday life and lived space. It shows, how these thoughts have resonated also partly in planning theories 20 years ago, and states that planning theory is currently very much embracing critiques of everyday life and lived space in a decade of crises, disruption and urban unsettling.
Lecture Unit 3 Urban Everyday Life + The Ordinary City
This lecture unit emphasizes the ordinary dimension of space characterized by lived difference. It addresses geographical thought focusing on geographies of encounter and connects these to ideas about ordinary cities as sites of ordinary planning.
Lecture Unit 4 Urban Lived Space + The Embodied City
This lecture unit emphasizes the relational dimension of space as lived space shaped by bodily encounters. It addresses a related body of sociocultural and feminist thought focusing on space, the body and culture, and relates these to ideas to cities as sites of performative planning.
Lecture Unit 5 Urban Restructuring + The Insurgent City
This lecture unit involves with a body of literature that empirically track down patterns of global (urban) restructuring in different cities and which develop a conceptualization of resistance and insurgencies to add new perspectives into urban studies and planning theory. Conceptualizing space as always emerging and messy, ordinary and contested is at the heart of approaches focusing on insurgents and insurgencies.
Lecture Unit 6 Urban Emancipation + The Post-Political City
This lecture unit delineates how theorizing space has always been central to the urban study of politics, the political and democracy.Through an exploration of emancipation in recent processes of capitalist urbanization, an argument is portrayed that the political is enacted through the everyday practices of publics producing space. This suggests democracy is a spatial practice as well as an abstract professional field organized by institutions, politicians and movements.
The lecture unit examines spaces, conditions and circumstances in which emancipatory practices impact the everyday life of citizens. We ask: How do emancipatory practices relate with public space under ‘post-political conditions’? In a time when democracy, solidarity and utopias are in crisis, we argue that productive emancipatory claims already exist in the lived space of everyday life rather than in the expectation of urban revolution and future progress yet to come.
Lecture Unit 7 Urban Resistance + The Neoliberal City
This lecture unit examines the spaces, conditions, and processes in which neoliberal practices have profoundly impacted the everyday social, economic, and political life of citizens and communities around the globe. It explores the commonalities and specificities of urban resistance movements that respond to those impacts. It focuses on how such movements make use of and transform the meanings and capacity of public space. It investigates their ramifications in the continued practices of renewing democracies. By better understanding the processes and implications of the recent urban resistances, the lecture unit contributes to the ongoing debates concerning the role and significance of public space in the practice of lived democracy.
Lecture Unit 8 Urban Individualization + The Entrepreneurial City
This lecture unit highlights a key concept that has emerged in Western cities and that has rendered space as place of individuals, individualism and individualization. Especially market-oriented conceptions to theorize space and planning have highlighted the idea of individual freedom over (individual, collective) equality and have produced new entrepreneurial scripts for urban futures that until today remain highly contested due to their social, political, cultural and ecological shortcomings.
Lecture Unit 9 Urban Difference + The Post-Colonial City
This lecture unit explores how theorizing space has always been central to postcolonial accounts in the field of urban studies and planning theory. Particularly the way how we make our and 'other' worlds, how progress is seen as part of the modern Western city and how Eurocentric and Western Urban Studies Perspectives have become highly criticised in urban studies and planning theory are central to the lecture: We ask, finally, which underlying conceptions of space and place accomply the post-colonial turn in urban studies, and use cultural studies perspectives (e.g.in field of cultural geography, ethnography and cultural geography) to decipher approaches of framing space 'other' than expected.
Lecture Unit 10 Urban Crises + The City of Care
This lecture unit addresses the pros and cons of a strictly crisis-centered reading of urban space and urban care debate particularly during the last decade. It introduces conceptions of space based on affect and opportunities for meaningful human and beyond-human encounters in space and offers some ideas how specific groups, e.g. people living with dementia, use everyday urban spaces, and how planning can learn from their practices and needs
Lecture Unit 11 Urban Disruption + The Unsettled City
While urban life can be characterized by endeavors to settle stable and safe environments, for many people urban space is rarely stable or safe; it is uncertain, troubled, imbued with challenges, and perpetually under pressure. As the notion of unsettled appears to define contemporary urban experience, this lecture unit investigates the conflicts and possibilities of settling and unsettling through open and speculative analysis.The analytical prism of unsettled renders urban space an indeterminate ground unfolding through routines, temporalities and contestations in tension between settling and unsettling. Such contrasting experiences are contingent on how urban societies confront, undergo and overcome turbulence and difficulties in time and space. The lecture unit focuses on theorizing the unsettled urban condition, in context with a chronopolitical emphasis on urban temporalities.
Lecture Unit 12 Retrospective and Summary
This lecture provides a concluding retrospective of all presented theories of space, city conceptions and planning theories. It will offer space for open question and to address new demands for theorizing space, planning and everyday life.
The Kick-Off of the Elective Module 5: Society, Everyday Life and Space will take place on October 4, 2022, 9:00 - 11:00 am together with all Course Instructors.
We invite all students to participate:
Tuesday, 4.10.2022 | 9:00 am - 11:00 am | Room BA 02B
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The course shall be assigned to the following elective modules:
- Wahlmodul 5: Gesellschaft, Alltag und Raum
- Wahlmodul 1: Global Development of Cities and Regions (tbc)
The course mainly addresses master students (and late bachelor or early doctoral students) from planning and architecture. We explicitly welcome students coming from other Viennese universities in disciplines relating to urban studies such as educational studies, migration studies, urban design, geography, (work, urban) sociology, political science, landscape architecture, cultural studies (‘Mitbeleger’ at TU Wien). The course language is English. We support students’ active participation in debates and interactive teaching formats. We encourage students to bring in and develop their own ideas and critical perspectives. We seek to create an international level of debate and exchange and welcome students from all countries and cultures. Just contact us (info@skuor.tuwien.ac.at).
